It's May

and here it's time to plant the winter garden. Actually what spurred me into action is in part due to my friend, Carol, who has been posting about her newly set up vegetable garden. I'm still picking some summer crops - Lebanese cucumbers and a few zucchinis are coming on as well as some butternut squash plus lettuces, rainbow chard, basil (and other herbs) and spring onions - and this means that I've had limited space to plant anything new but it's time - and not only in the veggie patch. The flower beds have been looking somewhat stressed, too, to the point that last week I pulled out most of the annuals and dug the beds over ready to plant.

I haven't been able to garden as much as I would like this summer, thanks to a foot fracture followed almost as soon as I was out of the 'boot' that required for several months by a painful soft tissue injury to the same foot which has taken nearly two months to heal - but last weekend I decided it was time to deal with the garden. I persuaded Pisces that I needed to visit a garden centre - not that he was all that hard  to convince since it adjoins our local Bunnings hardware store which was quite a sweetener. I started with 100 daffodil bulbs and some scarlet tulips and some annual seedlings - and that was before I got to the vegetable seedlings.

We arrived home with two cartons of seedlings which then, of course, I needed to plant. Yesterday I set out the daffodil bulbs, planted up some hanging baskets with strawberries and started getting the vegetable garden ready to plant. We have sandy soil here that easily becomes water resistant during the summer so the first step was to break up the soil and then to spread around some soil wetting agent and water it in. Luckily it rained overnight and this morning so today was the day. It was a somewhat dampening experience as I dodged showers but at least all the plants - and some of the seeds are in.

So now we have a veritable feast to look forward to, don't we, with new beds of red onions, pak choi, kale, broccoli, coriander, beetroot, dwarf French beans, snow peas and sugar snap peas. I still have a few other plants I want to get and put in. Better get out the seed packets, hadn't I. Hmm, maybe tomorrow.